Interview with UK Author Sensation Rachel Abbott
Earlier this summer, fellow author and friend Rachel Abbott graciously interviewed me for her blog (you can read that interview here, by the way), and…
My Writing Secret Weapon
For as long as I’ve been writing—over 20 years professionally now—I’ve collected articles on writing, handwritten snatches from books on writing, examples from great authors,…
Engaging Novels About a Detective
The other day, after publishing the second novel in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series—The Rich Are Different—I pulled a giant plastic crate labeled “Dakota Stevens…
The Rich Are Different is Now Available
The second book in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series by Chris Orcutt, The Rich Are Different, is now available for Kindle on Amazon. In February, I…
Good Enough Isn’t Good Enough
If I were merely interested in selling copies of the second Dakota & Svetlana adventure, The Rich Are Different, I would probably release the novel…
Please Bear With Me During Remodeling
Because of a recent pharmaceutical spam attack on some of my websites, I am in the midst of moving this blog and DakotaStevens.com to another…
Hemingway Had the Pilar, I Have Golf
Every morning while living in Key West and Cuba, Ernest Hemingway rose early to write, and every afternoon he went out cruising and fishing on…
Rewriting The Rich Are Different
While in the post office the other day, a couple of postal workers who bought A Real Piece of Work complimented me on the writing.…
The Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe: An Interview with Jeff Bennington
Greetings, readers. Today, for the first time in the history of my blog, I’m making somebody else the focus. Today I’m going back to my…
Next in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series…
Back in late November 2011 when I released A Real Piece of Work, I promised to release book #2 in the series, The Rich Are…
The Free Ebook Experiment — Part 2 —Conclusion
Last week I said I would report on the results of my 2 “free days” on Amazon’s KDP Select: the total number of free downloads,…
Writing vs. Self-Promotion
The big problem facing writers today is finding a balance between writing and self-promotion. I’m currently doing a free promotion of my Kindle mystery novel,…
The Free Ebook Experiment — Part 1
According to the new, social-networking philosophy of book promotion, one of the most effective ways of building your audience is to give away copies of…
It’s All About the Reader
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a mystery novel, a mystery novel that only one agent and zero editors believed in. This mystery novel was…
A Shattered Paradigm
I have read hundreds of books on writing. Conservatively figuring an average of 15 per year, over 24 years that makes 360 books on the…
An Open Thank You Letter to Readers
This one is for you readers. For those of you who took a risk on a relatively unknown quantity (me) by plunking down cash for…
Chris Orcutt’s Barbaric Yawp
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass THE OTHER DAY, I wrote that I was going to “take it…
You Don’t Need a Kindle to Read A Real Piece of Work
Friends, Romans, Countrymen: I’ve received dozens of messages from would-be book-buyers who say, “I’d love to read A Real Piece of Work, but I don’t…
1,000 Mysteries and the Ideal Reader
A common piece of advice given to writers is to envision your ideal reader and write your book to that person. And although I didn’t…
What I Learned While Publishing the Dakota Stevens Series on Kindle
What did I learn from publishing the first novel in my new detective series on Kindle? A lot of disjointed things that would take too…
Why I’m Publishing My P.I. Series on Kindle
The short answer is this: A writer writes to be read, and the two P.I. novels I wrote that were sitting on my hard drive…
Love Story to Sweetie
Farewell, my beloved feline Muse. Writer Chris Orcutt’s eulogy to his faithful, beautiful cat of 9 years, Sweetie.
The Dilemma of the 21st Century Writer
I had big plans for this blog entry. BIG plans. When I originally envisaged this piece, it was going to be a 5,000-word polemic on…
Farewell, Millbrook Round Table
Walking into the diner yesterday, I glanced at the honor box containing our village newspaper, The Millbrook Round Table, and was shocked to read the…
Burning Your Ships
A while back, I got in an online argument with another writer. He was proffering financial advice to writers, in effect saying this: “I made…
Index Cards Are Sexy
I’d like to share some thoughts about index cards. My new writing, with the exception of blog entries of course, is happening on index cards. The…
The Pencil Twitter
Quite a while ago, my good friend Jason started a Twitter feed about his cat, Sockington. The feed has not only become extremely popular, with over…
Preparing for Success: An Addendum
Today I opened my email and found a lovely note from a fellow writer, La Belette Rouge. She wrote to tell me that a blog…
What the Hell Kind of Nest am I Building Here?
“All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and…
Abraham Lincoln, Writer
He didn’t go to a fancy Eastern college. In fact, Abraham Lincoln had virtually no formal education at all. However, his study of the Bible…
My Favorite Books: Nabokov’s LOLITA
Whenever I’m in the middle of rereading it, the novel Lolita casts such a spell on me that I often forget I have it on…
My Favorite Books: Hemingway’s A MOVEABLE FEAST
You know a book is a favorite of yours when you have multiple copies of it, and you find some of those copies in the…
The Creative Tension Imperative (NOT Kant’s Categorical Imperative, thank God)
Back in 2000-01, when this blog phenomenon began to take off, my dear friend Jason Scott Sadofsky encouraged me to start one of my own.…
Surprise Causes Writer to Choke on Big Mac
The first time I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp, I choked on a Big Mac. It was a cold March day 15…
Shut Up, Hemingway
“Writing is rewriting.” — Ernest Hemingway Yeah, yeah, I know the story about the last chapter of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—that he…
Harlan Ellison’s Wonderful Rant
We live in a time of word saturation. Written content of all kinds—blogs, stories, articles, essays, this blog—is freely available for downloading, printing, emailing to…
My Granite Reminder
Like a lot of writers, I keep a stone on my desk to use as a paperweight. But mine has a special meaning to me…
Polishing
I’m in the middle of polishing my latest novel, and because I find the process so onerous, I’ve decided to take a break from it…
What the Hell Are Syntactic Slots?
Yesterday I alluded to John Gardner’s book on writing, The Art of Fiction, and casually mentioned syntactic slots. Since then, I’ve received a few emails…
Love Makes Me Write, Not Self-Discipline
I never get sick. I mean never. The last time I was sick was three years ago with a cold, and just before that, a…
The Only Thing You Can Control
Toiling away on index cards has a way of putting things in perspective. Whether you’re hunched over a cubicle deep in your local library, or…
Preparing for Success
On a snowy day in January, I wandered into a Borders bookstore and did something I always do when I’m seeking answers—I let synchronicity guide…
The Masters of Narrative Drive
Over the past year, I’ve become obsessed with the writers of paperback noir/crime/sleaze novels from the late 40s through the 60s. Having now read at…
Cutting
No, I’m not referring to the sick practice of using razor blades on myself—although there have been times when I’ve been tempted to. I’m talking…
On the Virtues of Typewriters and Pencils
Here’s the thing with pencils and typewriters—they never go out of date, they never need updated software, and they never require virus protection. Three years…
His Pen Was Quick
On July 17, Mickey Spillane, creator of the infamous Mike Hammer PI series, died. He was 88, and by all accounts he lived a pretty cool life.
In addition to writing several bestselling novels that readers adored, Spillane played a mystery writer on the 70s TV show Columbo, appeared in several commercials for Miller Lite beer, and married a hot second wife, Sherri Manilou, who posed for the cover of his novel The Erection Set.
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